Let’s.eat

App to dynamically and quickly choose a place and time to eat with friends by aggregating user preferences and constraints, all in one place

Brahm Wieseneck , Sabrina Peltier , Ellen Manford , Ivan Camps
2021-05-15

Problem Statement

Though humans are social creatures that love to spend time engaging the world around us with people we care about, the fact that we all live independent, fast-paced lives can make it difficult to find the time and effort to make plans. More specifically, choosing the optimal time and place to go out to eat with friends can create a lot of inefficiency that can stem from conflicting schedules, repetitiveness in eating choices, and overlooking individual preferences. People crave variety and spontaneity– they also want the ability to make the most informed decision for themselves with ease, and that’s where our solution comes in.

User Personas

Persona 1

Personality 1: The College Student Name: Liam Age: 21 Personality: Liam is a college student on an urban/suburban campus. Liam is a busy engineering student taking a full course load and is involved with clubs and organizations on campus. With friends from his Greek organization, classes, and extracurriculars, Liam is often making plans to meet up with his friends for dinners or drinks when he has time in his busy schedule.

Persona 2

Personality 2: The busy college graduate Name: Jessica Age: 25 Personality: Jessica works in New York City in marketing. She is three years out of college and her friends are all working time intensive jobs. When she can, she loves to reconnect with her college friends and high school friends. It can be hard though with everyone’s demanding schedules, and if plans are made they are often last minute. It can be hard to find the right place to go when they are making last minute reservations.

Persona 3

Personality 3: The adult: Parent and worker Name: Micheal Age: 45 Personality: Micheal lives in the suburbs of an urban city. He has a loving wife and two kids. He works in the city and has a busy work schedule that is often changing because of internal and client meetings. Micheal and his wife often try to make dinner plans with their couple friends at least one night a weekend. Scheduling is hard, but he does his best to block out time. Micheal would love to be able to update his timing and see what times his friends are free to best schedule his meetings and prioritize his family and friends in a way that does not compromise his work.

Conversation Starters

  1. How do you usually choose where to eat with your friends?
  2. How often do you go out to eat with friends?
  3. What’s most important to you when making this decision?
  1. Ask question iteratively with focus on location, cost, type of food, and distance from each attendee (equity)
  1. How often do you use food apps?
  2. What’s the process from idea to dinner when you are making plans currently

User Interviews

Interview 1: Zack Leder

Interview 2: Zarina Iman

Interview 3: Natasha Dalmia

Interview 4: Vaed Khurjekar

Learnings from the User Interviews

Learning 1

Zack helped refine our MVP by sharing that he had never experienced a conversation about distance between attendees. Zack told us that time, price and food type were the most important things to him, and importantly depending on the day his rankings on how important these factors are to him will change.

Learning 2

Zarina revealed that even though she lives in the suburbs and the friends she meets up with live all across NYC, she cares very little about finding an equidistant location to meet up and cares more about the type of restaurant and likes to instead choose a specific location in a cool part of the city. Public transportation is a big part of NYC culture and its pretty normal to travel by train to anywhere within the city. She also helped us determine some features of our app based on her desire for a user-friendly app that is aesthetically pleasing, has pictures of food, and allows for reservation booking.

Learning 3

From Natasha we learned people frustrated when trying to find a restaurant, it is problematic to organize the group and that outings are typically organized through a group chat, will sometimes break off into side conversations lasting around 30 minutes. The interview confirmed having a group with unique criteria makes finding a singular place difficult and that cuisine and cost are the biggest factors. We learned that distance is not a relevant factor in the decision making process.

Learning 4

Vaed helped the group shed some light on the factors that play a larger role in the decision making process –he pointed out that since most of his friends live fairly close to campus, finding a place that is somewhat equidistant from all members of the group is not a priority. As a result, our focus deviated from finding an optimal location for the group to meet toward identifying the best time and restaurant given the diversity of time, location and food type preferences among the group members.

Storyboarding a Solution

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A list is compiled of all the restaurants that represent the aggregated preferences The relative price range of each is displayed, along with the option to browse through a complete menu with pictures and prices *Those displayed are restaurants with available reservations for the time and number of people selected, and users can choose the one that they prefer based on the type of food

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Next Steps

Our next steps if we pursue the project further is to make digital mock-ups of the different pages of our app and run another round of user-interviews to gain feedback about how user-friendly and overall engaging our design is. We would like to see if this idea actually solves the key problem and how we can improve. From there would come the design of an actual app that we can release as a trial.